Hybrid Work Cut Quit Rates by 1/3rd in New Study

Hybrid isn’t going anywhere–and that could be a good thing for retention, according to new research.

Nick Bloom, Stanford economist and work-from-home expert, co-authored a paper on the impact of hybrid work at a large, multinational Chinese technology company, Trip.com, for six months between 2021 and 2022. Employees in a “randomized control trial” worked three days per week in the office and two days from home, and approximately the same hours as the standard eight-hour U.S. workday.  

The paper–published in the science journal Nature–found that hybrid working didn’t impact business performance. In fact, job satisfaction increased, and quit rates decreased by a third. For “non-managers, female employees and those with long commutes,” the drop was particularly significant, according to the report. 

This shows that the retention gains from hybrid work could be hugely profitable for any business, whether that’s a small startup in the U.S. or a larger organization with a multinational footprint, Bloom says: “Quits are really expensive… It’s just an enormous amount of time for HR, managers, and that’s many tens of thousands of dollars.”  

Managers were skeptical about the productivity impacts of hybrid work before the trial, but afterwards, they had a net positive view. To Bloom, this is indicative of the negative perceptions some leaders had of fully remote work. “But that’s not hybrid,” he says. 

Indeed, while fully remote work has been tied to some drops in productivity, hybrid has emerged as the most preferred and common arrangement for remote-capable jobs since the pandemic, according to Gallup.  

Hybrid workers, leaders, and managers extol benefits like better work-life balance, reduced burnout, and greater efficiency, per the Gallup report. That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges–employees and managers alike identified struggles with collaboration and workplace culture in the Gallup report. But employees reported challenges at half the rate of the advantages.  

With these new findings, Bloom says, “the evidence is against calling people in five days a week.”